Excellent

Virginia DeBolt — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:21:15 -0500

I went through to Women's Voices for Change and read your most excellent article, then tweeted and stumbled it.

Virginia DeBolt
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Sistercide: The Limits of Feminism

bartywink — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:52:09 -0500

Sistercide:The Limits of Feminism

By Lenton Aikins, Ph.D., J.D.

The success of Hillary Clinton may well turn out to be a curse for black-white feminism and the murder of any black-white female solidarity. It all hinges on how far white women want to engage in racial revenge. Yes, racial revenge!

White women have voted for white male presidential candidates from time immemorial in America. The only variation has been which of the lesser evils—democratic or republican candidate. Now, 22% of the ones who voted for Hillary say they would rather vote for McCain rather than for Barack Obama. Why? (I believe the leader in Ohio was one of Thomas Jefferson’s descendents who wanted to drum Thomas Jefferson’s black descendants out of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Organization. What does that tell you about this opposition?)

To be sure, some of the resentment is taken out on Senator Obama because he deflated the hopes of white women, and not a few black women, by defeating Senator Clinton.

Rather than seeing her as a competent competitor who was out strategized by Obama, white women prefer to see Clinton’s defeat as a manifestation of a widespread venomous anti-feminine conspiracy denying Clinton to a nomination which white women felt entitled. It was not.

Had Obama made as many mistakes, missteps, and miscues as Clinton made in her campaign, these women would have been attributing his mistakes to his inexperience and as such dismissed his candidacy as a good run for a novice—and a black. Obama did not make a single significant mistake during the entire primary campaign. His problems were delivered to him from outside of his campaign, principally by his former pastor.

Still, white women are angry. Their anger is a manifestation of two significant problems that plague black people:

1. The propensity for a group discriminated against to see themselves as the victim, e.g. engage in a victim hood philosophy; and,

2. Racism disguised and rationalized; for any of the facile excuses; this is white racism, pure and simple. Blacks are known to have engaged in these two reactions time and time again when the root of the problem had nothing to do with racism.

The cry of victim hood or self-pity is a well-entrenched practice by groups who have oppressed or discriminated against. This cry is all the more voluminous when the group has a little confirming history on it side. Certainly, white women have both history and denial of opportunity on their side. Perhaps they can now better understand the cries of victim hood by black Americans, perhaps. If white women carry through on their threats to vote for McCain instead of Obama, they will commit “sistercide”-- killing off future significant cooperation between white and black women for a generation to come. The sisterhood between black and white women has always been laden with tension and this tension goes back to the abolitionist-suffragettes movement.

If white women voters carry out their threat and vote for McCain, it will mark the end of substantial cooperation between black and white women for decades—even among those black women who supported Clinton. This would generate a movement in the black bloggersphere to denounce any future sistercide by white women as false and as racism, even if the mainstream media tries to ignore it—especially if Barack loses.

This brings me to the racial element.

Blacks know that white women’s reactions are not simply based on disappointment with the defeat of Hillary by Barack. Blacks understand that much of this bitterness by white women is based on racism—pure and simple. White women have from time immemorial voted for white men in the United States. Now, suddenly white women declare that they are going to take out their bitterness on the black guy—a man who has their interests at heart and whose platform is almost identical to Clinton’s. Why would white women take such a harsh stance against their own interest? The answer is they do so because of latent and blatant racism, the sin quo non of irrationality.

We now live in the You Tube generation and in the bloggersphere era and there is no way that black women will forget or forgive white women if they vote against Obama and he loses.

The question is will white women commit sistercide by supporting McCain, a man who opposes a woman’s right to choose, opposes universal health care, opposes health care for children and supports a hundred-year occupation in Iraq?

Freedom means the right to be stupid and vengeful and even to commit suicide. It also means the obligation to accept the rules of the game and live with them. Will the real white women democrats stand up?

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©All Rights Reserved. Reproduction is permitted provided credit is given. Lenton Aikins, Ph.D., J.D. Dr. Aikins has traveled widely, lived abroad in Europe and Latin America, recently spending three years in Costa Rica as Director of a Spanish Language school. He holds a Ph. D. in Political Science from University of Southern California, a Juris Doctor in Law from Western State University, College of Law. He is the author of many articles and of While African Americans Slept: Leadership by Parasites, now available at: http://zitpub.com, and available in all bookstores July 1, 2008. To read his blog, Dr. Aikins Political Commentary, go to: http://lentonaikins.com and click on blog.

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Sistercide: The Limits of Feminism